THE POTENTIAL FOR MORAL HAZARD IN AN ALLOPATHIC INTERVIEW SETTING

Abstract

The value of an allopathic medical school interview lies in its inherent ability to produce something of value that is unobtainable by other means: a rough assessment of the non‐ cognitive components of a viable candidate. Many allopathic institutions rely on the interview when determining applicant viability for both professional standards and institutional fit. However, applicants can distort the truth or train themselves to appear to exude any one of a number of admirable qualities for a brief period of time. Responses that reflect socially acceptable answers, rather than the true nature of an applicant’s character, represent forms of dishonesty. It is our belief that the high‐stakes setting of a conventional allopathic interview creates a moral hazard for prospective matriculates, such that applicants’ genuine responses are confounded with social desirability bias. Social desirability is often simplified for the research world to refer to the articulation of both self‐deceptive enhancement and impression management (IM). We sought to establish the presence of impression management and/or self‐deceptive enhancement tactics among interviewing allopathic medical school applicants. The presence of the aforementioned was determined using the 6th version of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR), a validated inventory that relies on 40 self‐responses on a Likert scale to common situations. We offered the BIDR interview to all interviewing applicants to the University of Arizona College of Medicine ‐ Phoenix on three of the six interview days. This inventory was administered during a 10 minute break period offered directly after the completion of the university’s multiple mini interviews, so as to assess the presence or absence of social desirability as close to the high stakes setting as possible. We received 104 responses, 12 of which were not included in the dichotomous scoring because they were not completed in their entirety. Our findings from 92 allopathic medical school applicant respondents indicated that our average interviewing medical school applicant was engaging in impression management tactics above and beyond the oft‐referenced BIDR cutoff values, with an average of 7.543/20; however, they were not engaging in self‐deceptive enhancement tactics beyond their BIDR reference peers with an average of 6.27/20. Both self‐ deception and impression management exist on a spectrum; however the arbitrary cutoffs of honest impression management established by Paulhaus’ 6th version of the BIDR were exceeded. Our results indicate that the context of allopathic interviews is associated with increased levels of impression management tactics; conversely, it is not associated with increased self‐deceptive enhancement tactics.